Jack
Dann was honored as the writer guest of honor at DragonCon 2005.
(Photo by Jean Marie Ward)

Multi-award winning
writer of novels and short fiction, poet, teacher, groundbreaking editor,
and (once upon a time) Method actor with a lingering fondness for leather
jackets -- Jack Dann more
than qualifies as a Renaissance man. Therefore, it should come as no surprise
that of all the fabled writers of science fiction's New Age Dann would
be the one compelled to explore the past. Novels such as The Memory
Cathedral (Dann's evocation of the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci), The
Rebel (about Fifties icon James Dean) and The Silent (which
looked at the Civil War from the eyes of a lost child) moved Dann's books
into the mainstream. But true to the spirit of early novels like The
Man Who Melted and High Steel, all of Dann's work shares a
"spine of fantasy" and a masterly use of the tools of genre fiction.

Dann himself likes
to share. One of the most prolific and successful collaborators in speculative
fiction, he has written -- and in many cases, won awards with -- SF greats
Susan Caspar, Gardner Dozois, Jack C. Haldeman II, Michael
Swanwick and his wife, Australian editor and critic Janeen Webb.
Crescent Blues caught up with Dann at DragonCon
2005, about a month before the release of The Fiction Factory,
the definitive anthology of these wide-ranging collaborations. We asked
him to share some of the stories behind his stories, then hung on for
a ride through time.

Crescent Blues:
You've described The Rebel as more mainstream than science-fiction.
What was the journey that led you from books like High Steel and
The Memory Cathedral to The Rebel?

Jack Dann: Well, in
my heart I consider The Rebel to be an alternate history,
but my interests in writing this, I guess, were mainstream in intent.
As a writer, as things interest me, and I feel compelled to do something,
I start researching the subject. That's why you won't find series and
sequels of fantasy novels from me, because I tend to get interested in
something, and then I get interested in something else. And I have found
that the tools that I honed while I was making my bones as a science fiction
writer work very, very well across in other genres -- and out of genre.

I had a conversation
with Pam Sargent and Kim Stanley Robinson about this -- that the way a
science fiction writer thinks is really helpful when you're doing historical
fiction, because like science fiction, the background becomes a character,
and you have to learn how to communicate a lot of information without
big narrative lumps. I mean, Heinlein's classic line, "The door iris opened,"
tells you worlds about the background.

When you're writing a science fiction novel, you're extrapolating
the future. When you're writing a historical novel, you're extrapolating
the past. Before I wrote The Memory Cathedral, I read a
lot of historical novels, and what I found was so many of them were costume
dramas. It was basically people like you and me doing stuff in the past.

When I started doing
research about the Renaissance -- because as an SF writer, I'm interested
in the mindset, and I want to find out where is it different -- I found
that the mindset was very different. They did not perceive the world the
way we do. Their sensoriums were very different.

I usually use original
sources, but I had read a book by writer who was actually getting into
science fiction, a writer by the name of [Ioan P.] Couliano, a brilliant
historian. The name of the book was Eros and Magic in the Renaissance.
It was like hallucinating when I read it, because he delineated how the
mindset was profoundly different from our own. When I read that, I saw
how to do this book -- and a number of the reviewers for The Memory
Cathedral said they hallucinated it. What I tried to do with that
book -- and that's the way I try to write -- is to let the reader feel
what it might have been like to be there and to think in that different
kind of way. That's what science-fiction writers do.

There was a book by
Julian Jaynes called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of the Bicameral Mind, which was a book that was very big in the
Seventies. In the introduction to that book, he talks about how it would
be to have bicameral perception, and he gives you an experiment to do.
He talks about how in ancient times, the idea of the mind or brain wasn't
in the head; it was in the spleen. As he talks you through the experiment,
how it would be to perceive to have the center of your thought in this
different place, it physically feels different, because when you think
of yourself, it's almost as if you don't think of yourself with this brain,
this gelatinous matter. It's almost like it's made out of light.

So I'm reading this book about Leonardo, and I
had this vision of these gothic-looking flying machines flying over
Florence…

For me, it's turning
around, it's twisting the way that we perceive the world. And that, to
me, is the joy of reading science fiction. It's a thought experiment of
how it would feel and how we would act in a different realm in this different
world.

For historical fiction,
I think it's the closest thing you can get to the sense of being in the
past. You can't really do this in nonfiction. You can get the information
but not that sense of being in the past. So in many ways, historical fiction
and science-fiction are very similar. And in all my fiction -- I may be
going off the beam here -- there is a spine of the fantastic or the fabulous.

So in my mainstream
novel, The Silent, which is about an adolescent caught up
in the Civil War, is an absolutely authentic, accurate account of events
in the Civil War. But in Virginia, during the Civil War, there was folklore
concerning black dogs. If there was going to be a battle, there would
be the ghost dog. Well, my young protagonist sees the ghost dog, and he
sees his whole family killed in the first chapter. They're burned. The
mother's raped. It's terrible. He sits stock still, watching it, and he
thinks that if he doesn't talk, if he isn't moving, that he's invisible.
Which is what he does, and the world of rational reality collapses.

I think it's psychologically
correct that what this adolescent does is create his own reality. So although
this is not a science fiction novel, it could be said to be a magically
realistic novel. I utilized the fantastic to explore reality. That's what
interested me; it's a layer of reality that is often not explored. But
my intent is often different. In a book like my science fiction novel,
The Man Who Melted, the intent was to write an extrapolative
science fiction novel. With something like The Silent, intent
was not genre, but genre tools are integral to the construction of the
novel.

Crescent Blues:
When you sit down to a novel, do you pretty much know where that novel's
going to take you?

Jack Dann: That's
a difficult question, because it depends on the novel. The Silent
was a hundred thousand words. I knew exactly where it was going to go.
It was all in my mind. With The Memory Cathedral, I was
sitting in my old hotel -- which is not my old hotel anymore, since it's
been bought up by various people, and they lost their history -- the old
Algonquin in New York. I was sitting in the lobby, and I was reading a
1930's book about Leonardo da Vinci, because I've found that if you want
to get real description you read books written before television, because
life was much slower. In other words, readers were much more patient than
they are now. So I'm reading this book about Leonardo, and I had this
vision of these gothic-looking flying machines flying over Florence, with
the Arno River like this silvery… It was almost like a hallucination,
and I thought: I want to make that. I want to take that photograph and
create that world for myself.

Crescent Blues:
Then the characters took over.

Jack Dann: And there
was something else that I had read. A historian by the name of Jean Paul
Richter -- you know the double-volume Dover editions of Leonardo's notebooks?
Richter was the one who compiled those. At one point in the book, Richter's
got a little note about Leonardo's letters to the Devatdar of Syria.

Most people believe Leonardo was doing shtick for Ludovico Sforza,
the duke of Milan, when he wrote these letters. Leonardo wanted to be
an engineer. That was his love -- creating munitions. But Sforza had him
building these wonderful toys for festivals, wonderful robotic things
that would open up. Leonardo wasn't really taken seriously then. So most
people believe the letters were written for the duke's entertainment.

But Richter says this
stuff is too specific, and it corresponds with events that happen in the
Middle East. So Richter believed that Leonardo was indeed in the Middle
East. When I put that together, I thought: "What if Leonardo, who was
in the Middle East, was invited by the Devatdar of Syria, who was working
for the sultan of Egypt, to be their munitions expert and could create
all the inventions that we have the sketches for? From the Gatling gun
to the submarine, all of the tanks -- what if he could bring these to
life? How would he deal with this?"

If
you look at his paintings, he's got a painting of these carts that have
scythes on the spokes of the wheels. These things would obviously cut
you to ribbons, but they're done like pastoral still lifes.

I was thinking of
[Werner] Von Braun, the Nazi scientist, and the others we brought over
here. They basically developed our space program. It's the idea of scientists
being neutral. So it became the story of a man who learns better. I asked
myself, how would Leonardo react if he could see the carnage that his
weapons would create. And I didn't know until I got to the end of the
book. I was writing the book to find out.

Half the book takes
place in Italy, and it's absolutely as authentic and true as I could make
it. In fact, when my agent went to Florence, she took the book as a guide.
She went to all the places mentioned in the book.

Then Leonardo goes
to the Middle East, and I had to start the research all over again for
the Middle East. But until I got to the end, I did not know how it would
turn out. It was like reading a suspense novel to find out whodunit, except
you're the one who's got to figure it out at the end.

There are some stories
where I have an image like that. There are other stories where I have
pieces of the plot, and there are some where I have the whole thing. It
varies from story to story, but I can't know that in advance.

Crescent Blues:
How has the Internet changed the perception of what constitutes mainstream
literature and what constitutes genre fiction?

Jack Dann: We're not
talking scientific data here, but what I think has happened -- and I think
the Internet has had a lot to do with it -- is that mainstream, popular
culture has been co-opting the tropes of the science fiction genre. In
the early days if you had a science fiction book, you'd put something
over it so people wouldn't know you were reading science fiction. But
now, look at the big movies. Look at all of the television shows. Where
we were trying to get into the mainstream, no one had figured that the
mainstream was going to pick us off, was going to co-opt us.

I
mean, "Beam me up, Scottie" is not something you need to have read any
science fiction to know it's around. There are vampire slayers on television.
In fact, there's tons of science fiction in the new television season.

Young
people today have a different sensory sensibility.

The big films are
genre. Science fiction has become part of the lingua franca of the popular
culture. Now granted, the stuff on the cutting edge -- today's equivalent
to, say, Bill Gibson's Neuromancer or the new China Mieville,
the new cutting edge stuff -- the difficult stuff will remain in genre,
but it leaves a wake, even though you could say that it gets simplified
or dumbed down. But that was Star Wars. Star Wars
was a loving appreciation of the most popular aspects of the genre.
So you've kind of got the cutting edge here, and it's moving this way.
Out from it and in its wake, ever widening, is that dispersion into the
general culture, so that some point what was really cutting edge becomes,
as I call it, part of the furniture.

It's interesting that
science fiction created a lot of the furniture, but where I am now, in
Australia, the literature is almost all fantasy. Yet the science fiction
tropes are in many ways more powerful. If I mention virtual reality, we
expect that this is around the corner. It's sort of here. I think that
the Internet is one of the ways that information is passed.

You can see changes.
We're talking about perception. I remember during the Sixties and Seventies
when consciousness raising and the feminist movement got started. I still
remember, during the antiwar movement and the peace movement, women got
the coffee. Just because these things were going on and everybody had
long hair and free sex didn't mean that it wasn't sexist as hell.

Now I grew up in an
extraordinarily sexist time, and I can remember -- remember earlier when
we were talking about the bicameral mind and all that -- I remember viscerally
what it felt like to be a sexist. It wasn't out of any meanness. This
was how the world was. I remember telling my girlfriend to get me a cup
of coffee. Well, the coffee was right there. I could've gotten a cup of
coffee myself. It just didn't occur to me. And then when the women's movement
started gaining momentum, I was a young guy, and I was interested in women.

I've always loved
women. Not in a stupid, sexual sense -- well, I've always loved them sexually
-- but I like women. I like them as friends. I like their sensibilities.
And the deal was all of the lovely people that I was interested in were
all going through consciousness raising. And if you want to date us,
honey, you're going to go to men's consciousness raising. So all of
us sexist pigs ended up going. And what happens when that happens is that
you may be doing it for all the wrong reasons, but you start seeing things
differently.

The downside of all
of this is -- I'm mean, it's been long enough that I'm not a sexist any
more. But I spent most of my adult life having to monitor myself, because
I would have a thought or be ready to say something and then I would have
to catch myself.

This is why I think racial problems are so difficult, because I'm
not a racist, but I grew up in a time when racism was OK. Being a Jew
boy means I have to deal with other people thinking: "Oh, dirty Jew --
oh no, I didn't think that." But if a black does something and you get
angry, you are not a racist when you think, "You bastard," rather than
something to do with his color. It's the same thing, I think, with feminism.

Now it's been long
enough for me that it doesn't occur to me that there are differences between
the sexes other than the physiological -- and certain sensibilities. And
in my relationships, when I was free to look at a mature age, what I wanted
in a partner had changed. I wanted someone who could probably run rings
around me. I didn't want someone who wasn't bright. I wanted someone who
was smart, because that was exciting. The old sexist wants someone who's
going to be out of the way. But I want someone in the way.

So I was around to
live through this, and I've also been around to watch the birth of the
computer. I used to work at IBM when I was a kid in university, and the
old 360s were half the size of this room. And the introduction of the
Internet -- the young people coming up now have been weaned on the Internet
and on computers and on MTV. I remember when MTV hit -- and Sesame
Street. It was information being thrown at you. We did not use
information that way before. Young people today have a different sensory
sensibility. They assimilate and integrate information very differently.
I mean, pick up a book written before television, then pick up one written
afterwards. You can see the difference.

On the Internet, there
are enormous amounts of information and enormous amounts of misinformation.
It's very difficult to find knowledge, and you look for information differently.
You're reading a bit here, you're going there, you're moving all over
the place. You're going laterally 80 percent of the time, when much thought,
analytical thought, needs to be straight line and rigorous. So I don't
know how that gets incorporated. It's going to be very interesting to
me to see where this goes. But I think there's a change of sensibility
in my lifetime that's as great as the sensibility shift from the Renaissance
into what we call "modern." You know they call Leonardo the first modern
man, but Leonardo was very much a person of his time.

With science fiction
we try to look out, but it's very hard. If you look at historical movies,
look at a 1940s' movie about ancient Egypt, you know those are 1940s'
hairstyles, because it's very hard to get out of our time. We get glimpses.
Maybe.

Crescent Blues:
You talk about writing The Silent lyrically, while the The Rebel
is written more like a phone call. How do you maintain your voice
as a writer when you're writing in so many different styles?

Jack Dann: Speaking
as a writer -- this never works, by the way -- they say writers fall into
two different types. Plot-style writers get their kick out of the plot
and its movement. Character-style writers are the ones who are writing
the extraordinarily purple prose, where if you need one adjective, they'll
use 25. For those writers who are plot-oriented, it will be all plot,
and the characters will be perfunctory. What I tell style-oriented people
is that style isn't something you add in. Style is the use of craft to
portray the characters and the action and the movement as economically
as possible without inserting yourself. As you do that, everything that
you are, everything that you know, your personality, becomes part of that
style. But it's a question of taking out. It's a question of being invisible.

I tell writers that
all of the metaphor, all of the allusions are not their concern -- if
they're doing it right. Their concern is to show how things taste and
sound, to do so in a way that the reader knows. It's like a play -- center
stage, right, left -- you economically let the reader see what's being
done.

As I research the characters and their world and what I want to
have happen, the characters take on their own voice. The Silent
was first person; the other books were third person. With third person,
you tend to be more writerly. But not only do the characters gain their
voice, but the book itself starts whispering to you in a voice.

With The Memory
Cathedral, I thought I was a camera. Each chapter would open up
like a camera so I could describe what was going on. Then I would move
in on Leonardo and his perceptions, but from a third person point of view.
With the Dean book, which was up-close and modern and about our times,
a lot of it was done on the phone -- phone calls, meetings. At one point,
Dean punches out Frank Sinatra. It wasn't done in present tense, but it
was done like a film, and it was a question of taking me out. So the characters
developed their voice, but the voice of the book was minimalistic. But
there's a lot of detail, because there are things a reader needs to know.

When you look around
this room you see different things. A writer tries to take the elements
that define this room -- the artificial ceiling, the multi-colored dirty
carpet, for example -- and the reader fills everything else in. That's
actually the way that the mind and the eye work. So that when you read
a book -- and this is what's different from watching a film -- when you
read a book, you write a book. As you read the lines, you're putting in
your own faces, your own colors. In a sense, you're collaborating with
the author.

So my job is to perfectly
describe anything that's there. What I give you needs to be detailed and
visualizable. Not vague. Not a word that sort of means what it is, but
the exact word, to make it as clear as I can for you, so you can create
the picture in your mind with your camera. That's why -- if this makes
any sense at all -- why the styles can be so different.

Crescent Blues:
In other words, the book sets the style.

Jack Dann: That's
right, and you know that through the research.

Crescent Blues:
Is there anything you'd like to add? Anything that we haven't touched
on that's important to your heart

Jack
Dann: I guess I would like my science fiction readers to look at the stuff
like The Rebel, which isn't necessarily being marketed into
the genre, because I've found that the readers, reviewers and the critics
in the genre, really get what I've been doing. The Rebel
was really an experiment. That was really sticking my neck out, and I
did get reviews -- and we're talking front page reviews -- where the reviewer
was saying: "But James Dean didn't die. So why did you write this book?"
In this case, I think that the mainstream has yet to catch up to the genre
sensibilities. So we're running ahead.

Crescent Blues:
So are you saying Dean did die or he didn't die?

Jack Dann: Well, he
doesn't die in the book. The author may be a maniac, but he's not completely
insane.